We, a group of people living on a street where we get a lot of dangerous motorbikers passing our homes, started collecting these video's recently.
Our goal is to get the roads closed for motorbikes, place bike-repelling infrastructure and to have police involved in the many cases of one-sided accidents. For that we need to convince local governments that motorbikes are misbehaving.
So we now sift through instagram, youtube, etc to find such video's you mention where they ride "our" roads. Or where individuals that we've seen riding our roads misbehave in other places. This is obviously nothing "legal proof", but it's a growing dossier. And also a clear reason why someone may not want to be filmed.
In one case, a motorbike lost control, narrowly missed a thick metal bar and plowed through two front yards of neighbors. Police was involved. We managed to find this individual on several other such videos clearly racing way over the speed limit. He lost his drivers licence. Not because of the video's, but they did help make the case this person was structurally misbehaving, not a one-time mistake or technical error.
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Sidenote, to illustrate this is not a few "get off my lawn" people, but that this is an actual problem: These motorbikers are but a few dozen individuals over the year, yet their noise and the danger and agression towards others road users is out of any proportion. This is a quiet nature reserve where people come to run, stroll, watch birds, go swimming with family, drive grandma around, bicycle, skate, picknick. Where our kids play and where our teens cycle to school. On busy days there can be hundreds of cyclists and pedestrians in a sunny afternoon. The speed limit is mostly 30km/h (18mph), the road is 2.5 to 3m (8-9ft) wide, traffic from both sides. Motorbikers have been seen to hit 130km/h (80mph). Where children are cycling, couples are walking, fitgirls skating and so on.
I sympathise with this, people who are endangering others deserve consequences of the law. I live in a city near a straight road and often hear bikes step through 2-3 gears at night. I know how fast that is and it’s dangerous.
One of the reasons I stopped riding with this group was a few people there didn’t have a strong will to live and so adrenaline and confrontation was what they were looking for.
The specific route I mentioned though is 50km outside of the nearest city, through a wasteland and ridden at times to minimise traffic getting in the way. The best time was 6pm on a Tuesday night where you’d be lucky to pass anyone.
If you have a way to "punish the misbehaving motorcycle riders" while allowing or even welcoming the rest, please share.
We've researched this. It's a European wide issue that's discussed, researched, tested and so on, throughout many communities and places. So far, there's no way to prohibit only the bad actors.
Part of the "infrastructure" changes would be things like speed bumps. Where it pays off to ride below the speed limit, and hard to ride above it. But that then makes some misbehaving drivers use their "0-100 in 8 sec" that their motorbike builder once promised. Going through four gears on a 500m stretch. The disturbance and noise gets worse then.
It gets harder because many solutions will harm all the other legitimate usage too, or harm them worse. Speed bumps and farmers' harvesting with large tractors are terrible for our houses that then literally shake on their foundation.
If, like us, you look at "motorcycle riders" as a community, it makes sense to point at that community and say: solve the danger and disturbance that those few amongst your community clearly pose to others. Because the alternative is that we'll have to "punish" your entire community.
New people will always be popping up to misbehave. Addressing the problem at the infrastructure level is the only way to ensure it's permanently solved.
Kind of like "why would you want to build a pedestrian bridge instead of just jailing the driver who hit someone at that intersection." The odds that it'll be the last time are basically zero.
Our goal is to get the roads closed for motorbikes, place bike-repelling infrastructure and to have police involved in the many cases of one-sided accidents. For that we need to convince local governments that motorbikes are misbehaving.
So we now sift through instagram, youtube, etc to find such video's you mention where they ride "our" roads. Or where individuals that we've seen riding our roads misbehave in other places. This is obviously nothing "legal proof", but it's a growing dossier. And also a clear reason why someone may not want to be filmed. In one case, a motorbike lost control, narrowly missed a thick metal bar and plowed through two front yards of neighbors. Police was involved. We managed to find this individual on several other such videos clearly racing way over the speed limit. He lost his drivers licence. Not because of the video's, but they did help make the case this person was structurally misbehaving, not a one-time mistake or technical error.
---
Sidenote, to illustrate this is not a few "get off my lawn" people, but that this is an actual problem: These motorbikers are but a few dozen individuals over the year, yet their noise and the danger and agression towards others road users is out of any proportion. This is a quiet nature reserve where people come to run, stroll, watch birds, go swimming with family, drive grandma around, bicycle, skate, picknick. Where our kids play and where our teens cycle to school. On busy days there can be hundreds of cyclists and pedestrians in a sunny afternoon. The speed limit is mostly 30km/h (18mph), the road is 2.5 to 3m (8-9ft) wide, traffic from both sides. Motorbikers have been seen to hit 130km/h (80mph). Where children are cycling, couples are walking, fitgirls skating and so on.